Serguei Popov, born in Brazil, is a research mathematician working in the field of Probability Theory and Stochastic Processes.^[6] He is an angel investor and the co-founder of the IOTA Foundation.^[1]

Education

In 1994, he received his Diploma from Moscow State University for the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics.^[8]

He graduated from and attained his Ph.D. in the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics at the Moscow State University under the supervision of Professor Mikhail Menshikov, in 1997.^[2]

Career

At the beginning of his career, Serguei moved to Brazil to do a post-doctoral and then progressed to a professorship first in the University of Sao Paulo.

In 1994, he started working as a Research Assistant at the Laboratory of Large Random Systems, Moscow State University, then left in 1998.

He had been a Postdoctoral researcher at the IME-USP, Sao Paulo, Brazil, from 1998 to 2001.

In 1998, he started working as a Researcher at Dobrushin's Mathematical Laboratory, IITP.

In February 2001, he started working as an Assistant Professor (MS-3) at the IME-USP, São Paulo, Brazil.

Then, from February 2022, he started working as an Associated Professor (MS-5) at the IME-USP, São Paulo, Brazil, and then left in 2009.

In February 2009, he started working as a Professor (MS-6) at the University of Campinas(IME-UNICAMP), Campinas, Brazil, worked there for over 11 years and then he left in March 2020.
^[9]
In March 2020, he became a Senior Researcher in Mathematics at the University of Porto, Portugal.^[3]

Serguei Popov published 83 articles in refereed journals and 1 book.

Crypto Career

Serguei's interest in cryptocurrencies began in late 2013 when he came across an article about Bitcoin. He subsequently became an avid reader of bitcointalk.org and discovered an innovative project called Nxt, an open-source cryptocurrency and payment network.

Serguei recognized that cryptocurrency was closely related to 'Poisson processes', a concept he was familiar with. He performed some preliminary calculations on the Nxt blockchain and presented them on a Bitcoin forum. His insights gained attention in the Nxt community after he published a brief analysis of the block generation process in Nxt. In collaboration with the founder of Nxt and other members of the community, he co-founded IOTA in 2015.^[4]

While working on the probabilistic aspects of Nxt, Serguei engaged in many discussions with Sergey Ivancheglo, also known as Come-from-Beyond, who was the enigmatic BCNext, the founder of Nxt. In early 2015, Sergey and David Sonstebo invited Serguei to contribute to the theoretical side of IOTA. Together, they extensively worked on the system's theoretical design.^[10]

IOTA

Serguei became a Member of the Board of Directors at IOTA in August 2018. He later assumed the role of Director of Research in November 2019. In February 2021, Serguei handed over the management of the IOTA research department to William Sanders, allowing him to concentrate on managerial oversight instead of day-to-day decisions and tasks.

Serguei authored the initial whitepaper on the IOTA's Tangle, which laid the foundation for the IOTA vision. He was also a driving force behind the IOTA Foundation’s research department. Serving as its Director of Research from late 2019 to 2022, the department has become one of the premier research groups in the field of DAG-based (directed acyclic graph) distributed ledger technology. Serguei departed IOTA in January 2022.

Commenting on the change in his position, Serguei said,

I’m happy that my mission at the IOTA Foundation is complete and that its Research Department continues to grow from strength to strength under the excellent leadership of William Sanders, leaving me free to return fully to my academic career (while I still can) and exchange the craziness of the crypto space for academia. Nevertheless, rest assured that I remain convinced of IOTA’s mission, and joining the Supervisory Board of the IOTA Foundation permits me to still be around and be of help, in case it is needed. I would like to take this occasion to express my profound gratitude to all people who shared this IOTA journey with me, from the very start to the present.^[11]

Conferences

2011

• 28o Colóquio Brasileiro de Matemática, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 18-29
• XV Escola Brasileira de Probabilidade, Angra dos Reis, Brazil, July 31 - August 6.
• 5th International Conference on Stochastic Analysis and its Applications, Bonn, Germany, September 5-9

2012

• Percolation and Interacting Systems, Berkeley, U.S., February 20-24.
• XII Latin American Congress of Probability and Mathematical Statistics (CLAPEM), Viña del Mar, Chile, March 26-30
• Random Walks and Random Media, Berkeley, U.S., April 30 - May 4
• SINAPE-2012. João Pessoa, Brazil, July 30 - August 3
• 3rd Workshop on Stochastic Modeling, Campinas, Brazil, August 29-31

2013

• Random walks: crossroads and perspectives, Budapest, Hungary, June 24-28
• XVII Escola Brasileira de Probabilidade, Angra dos Reis, Brazil, August 4-10
• Two days in stochastic analysis II, Campinas, Brazil, August 12-13

2014

• 11th German Probability and Statistics Days, Ulm, Germany, March 4-7
• Discrete Markov Chains: mixing times and beyond, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 27-31

2015

• Geometry of Random Walks and SLE: a Birthday Conference for Greg Lawler, Cambridge, UK, June 15-19
• XIX Escola Brasileira de Probabilidade, São Sebastião, Brazil, August 3-8

2016

• Random Walk in Random Graphs, DLA, and Related Topics, Marseille, France, June 6-8
• Leysin Workshop, Leysin, Switzerland, June 8-10
• XX Escola Brasileira de Probabilidade, São Carlos, Brazil, July 4-9
• Joint Meeting Brazil - Italy in Mathematics, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 29 - September 02
• Francis Comets' 60th birthday conference, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, December 12-16

2017

• Mathematical Congress of the Americas, Montreal, Canada, July 24-28

2018

• Polymer, Folding and Phase Transition, Marseille, France, April 3-6
• The 40th Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications – SPA 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 11-15
• CIMPA School: Geometry and scaling of random structures, Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 15-27

^[7]

2019

• Blockchain Life 2019 Moscow, Moscow City, Russsia, October 16 ^[5]

Awards and Fellowships

• Long-term research Grant by International Science Foundation, 1995
• Grant by ISSEP (Sorosovskie Aspiranty), 1996
• Grant by ISSEP (Sorosovskie Aspiranty), 1997
• Research Grant by Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research, 1997
• Fellowship (No. 24/17) by the Government of Russia, 1997
• Fellowship by FAPESP, 2001
• Fellowship by CNPq, 2020
• Fellowship by FAPESP (2018~2020)